Cooking with Linux - Browsers with the Speed of Lightning

When was the last time you heard someone mention the browser wars? Most pundits love to point out that Internet Explorer's only real competition is Mozilla Firefox. One or two will give Opera a nod. But, what about the underdogs of the browser world?

Note:

Think you may have heard of WebKit somewhere
else? That's because WebKit is the engine behind Mac OS X's Safari
browser.

Changes to Midori's interface and behavior are largely controlled via
the Preferences dialog (Figure 5). Click Edit on the menu bar, and
select Preferences. From there, you can set a default home page, change
the look and feel (including default fonts), and more. You'll also find
evidence of Midori's young age when you run into pages that don't yet
allow edits.

Figure 5. The Preferences menu gives
you access to much of Midori's configuration.

Midori is, as I mentioned, a young browser. It's also a
fascinating and promising project, and it's fast. Really fast. And,
it's the only browser on my system to pass the Acid3 test
(acid3.acidtests.org).

The final item on our menu is Hidetaka Iwai's Kazehakase, a
graphical browser that uses the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine to display
Web pages. As such, it doesn't lack for much when it comes to showing
off Web sites as you expect to see them. Kazehakase, which means
“Wind
Doctor” is named after a short story by the Japanese author
Sakaguchi
Ango. This is a great little program that features tabbed browsing,
customizable mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts, RSS bookmarks
and more (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Kazehakase is an excellent
browser based on the Mozilla Gecko engine.

Possibly the coolest thing about Kazehakase is its graded user
interface. It's a great concept. By default, the user interface is kept
as simple as possible, providing users with only the basics both in
terms of menu options and configuration of system preferences. The user
interface level (UI levels) can be set to beginner, medium or expert. At
each level, you find additional hidden gems under the surface that let
you fine-tune the browser. There are two ways to change the UI level. The
first is by changing the preferences. To get to the system preferences,
click Edit on the menu bar, then select Preference. The beginner UI
preferences window appears with the main options to the right and
a sidebar menu on the left (Figure 7).

Figure 7. On the left, you can see Kazehakase's basic (or beginner)
preferences. To the right is the same dialog but in expert mode.

There are only four categories of simple changes here. If you change
the UI level to expert, a much more complex and complete preferences
menu appears, as shown on the right-hand side of Figure 7. If you choose,
you also can toggle the UI level directly from the menu bar by clicking
View and selecting your level of expertise from the UI level submenu
(Figure 8).

Figure 8. Becoming an expert
in Kazahakase is just one little menu option away.

Kazehakase isn't widely available in distribution repositories, so you may
have to resort to the old extract-and-build five-step for that one. This
is a great little browser and well worth checking out.

There you have it, mes amis, the underdogs of the
browser
world—some of them anyhow, as I am sure there are plenty more. Can
any of them compete against the big guys? That depends on your needs
and constraints. If fast as lightning trumps a bulked-up feature
set, the underdogs win. The same is true on a small, underpowered
machine. Researchers who are more interested in text may opt out of
the graphical browsers entirely. Each underdog, you might say, can have
its day.

Speaking of day, this one is nearly done, and the only browsing I intend
to do after closing is in the wine cellar. Speaking of which, keep your
glasses handy as François will happily refill them a final time. Raise your
glasses, mes amis, and let us
all drink to one another's health.
A votre santé! Bon appétit!

Comments

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Sorry, but when Google Chrome first hit the scene, based on webkit, I looked at the KHTL origined webkit.
The quality must be suspect, after all a GNU/Linux based library to start with and the webkit developers made it so IT WON'T BUILD ON GNU/Linux?

poor code quality there.

They may have since fixed it, but their original screwup remains as proof they have low competency when it comes to development.